ModernizeOmnichannelIn the whitepaper Think your business offers an omnichannel experience? Think again!, its author Audrey William, Principal Advisor of ecosystm, explains why it is so crucial for businesses to engage with customers across multiple digital channels and be “proactive” instead of ‘’reactive’’ when trying to be omnipresent.

When you are running a contact center in “reactive” mode, you are attending to problems only when they occur, she explains. Unfortunately, that’s just what most contact centers do today. You are not thinking ahead and evaluating what might has gone wrong in the customer journeys and how you could have alerted the customer along the way.

“It is also likely that you are not analyzing the data and seeing how to make best sense of the data to engage better with your customers”, Audrey continues, highlighting that serving customers in a reactive mode, will certainly have an impact on revenue opportunities.

To deliver that proactive customer experience (CX), contact centers need to have the ability to predict the customer’s next move and/or send pre-emptive notifications before problems occur. When you start doing that, you are getting ahead in understanding how to deepen the customer engagement.

Finally, she gives the following ten useful recommendations on how to modernize your omnichannel strategy:

1. Perform a thorough review of how many solutions you are using in your contact center and look at areas where there are overlaps. Some systems might be redundant.

2. Assess which vendors you are using for chat, social, chatbots, email, voice, and messaging to understand if this can be merged into a single location.

3. Get feedback from customers about their channels of preferences. You may be surprised to find that some of your customers prefer channels that you do not offer.

4. Assess cost savings from having an omnichannel platform and the cost efficiencies of different timesaving features for your agents (e.g., automation, CRM integrations, etc.).

5. Investigate the possibility of having a central data repository and not storing data on vendors’ clouds.

6. Ensure that interactions across all channels are automated, so you do not have to rebuild interaction flows, increasing operational efficiency.

7. Take advantage of self-service analytics. The data will give you full visibility into how customers move through the multiple self-service journeys.

8. Continuously run testing on every single channel rigorously and make sure all your channels are synchronized. You must not revert to a multi-channel mode when there is an issue.

9. Re-define your contact center KPIs. For example, your AHT metric might need to be adjusted to be realistic for an asynchronous mode of communication.

10. Train your agents about the new changes as you go through a complete overhaul towards omnichannel modernization. Help them adapt to the new changes so there will be minimal disruption.

By MediaBUZZ